Posted on September 2, 2010 by Josh Delsman
It is no real secret that productivity comes in peaks and valleys. In a lot of environments, developers spend most of their time in the valleys, completely consumed by distractions and demotivating factors.
I’m going to discuss some of these, and how you can overcome them.
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Posted on August 30, 2010 by Josh Delsman
David Heinemeier Hansson and crew have finally flipped the switch on the final, stable version of Rails 3. This is great news for the Rails community, and for you when either building or upgrading your app to Rails 3. Here are nine of my favorite resources which can be used to get started with Rails 3:
These are likely to be made into production soon. However, these guides are the best for quickly getting started with Rails. They highlight some of the distinct differences in Rails 3, as well.
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Posted on August 30, 2010 by Josh Delsman
Are you passionate about Ruby, Rails or the profession of software development in general? I’m currently looking for guest writers to write either once (or, preferably, on a regular basis) for Tasty Rails. I’ll be adding a “guest author” section soon, profiling all past guest authors.
In addition, you’ll get some excellent exposure from those seeking Rails professionals on topics important to them.
If you’re interested in writing for Tasty Rails, please get in touch either through Twitter, Facebook or comment below.
Posted on August 26, 2010 by Josh Delsman
Upgrading to Rails 3 (now at RC2) can be nothing short of daunting when you maintain a large project, and even more so when more than one developer is involved. There isn’t yet a definitive resource for upgrading: what to look for, what to fix, what to set, what to delete. In the past few weeks, though, a few resources have popped up which help to ease the process.
There are a number of things to look out for when upgrading to Rails 3, and I’ll go over them in this post.
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Posted on August 23, 2010 by Josh Delsman
For the longest time, I’ve been on Tumblr and have been tinkering with and tweaking the layout. Discounting the fact that its probably pathetic that I don’t create my own layout, the one I have is pretty good so far. One thing, however, that a lot of Tumblr blog templates tend to do is make really crap title tags.
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Posted on August 20, 2010 by Josh Delsman
Since about 5PM on Wednesday, when the first TechCrunch article about the new Facebook location-based service came up in my RSS reader, I have been hearing barking and whining from all kinds of imbeciles on the Internet. What about? Well, mostly how the new Facebook Places is going to allow people to rob you while you’re not home, or how your worst enemy is going to be able to confront you at a coffee shop for a duel.
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Posted on June 7, 2010 by Josh Delsman
I just read an article from the New York Times about a 26-year-old graduate of New York University who has amassed an unsightly $97,000 balance of student loans over the course of her education. It is no secret that a vast majority of Americans who attend private schools are faced with similar situations. The question is, who is to blame, and is it worth it?
From the article:
Over the course of the next two years, starting when she was still a teenager, she borrowed about $40,000 from Citibank without thinking much about how she would pay it back. How could her mother have let her run up that debt, and why didn’t she try to make her daughter transfer to, say, the best school in the much cheaper state university system in New York? “All I could see was college, and a good college and how proud I was of her,” Cathryn said. “All we needed to do was get this education and get the good job. This is the thing that eats away at me, the naïveté on my part.”
Yes, no one — not the school, not the loan sharks named Sallie Mae and Citibank — thought to inform them of the cheaper, and very substitutable community or state colleges. How typical.
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Posted on June 3, 2010 by Josh Delsman
The MyHurricane Blog: Introducing MyHurricane 2.0
Have you ever wanted to stay informed about a hurricane’s movement while you’re at work, on the bus, evacuating, hunkered down inside the house before, during or after the storm, or just in general? Well, now you can.
My latest Ruby/Rails project, launching in June 2010!
Posted on February 23, 2010 by Josh Delsman
I’m going to be live tweeting from the best seat in the house here at Future of Web Apps 2010 in sunny (but a bit foggy) Miami Beach. I’m excited to meet Molly Holzschlag, John Resig, and many others here at the conference.
Check out my Twitter page at @voxxit for the latest updates.
Posted on February 13, 2010 by Josh Delsman
In two recent projects I have been working on at Ultraspeed, including the public Hostroute CORE signup form, I have decided to go with using HTML5 markup as a template.
It’s really not as hard as some people might think to get started with HTML5. There is a skeleton you can use to get started today:
Essentially, you can use every XHTML tag you’re used to using. In addition, there are many video/audio tags which work in more modern browsers. With using many of these new elements, you can essentially make your “supported browser” list look like the following:
- Internet Explorer with Google Chrome Frame installed
- Firefox 3.5+
- Safari 4.0+
- Google Chrome 3.0+
- Opera 10.5+
There are a couple great resources I have found for getting started with HTML5 in all its glory:
